More Revisionist History

The Food and Drug Administration has decided to remove social media posts and online materials commentary that overtly disdained and recommended against the use of Ivermectin as a Wuhan Virus infection treatment.

It’s good for the FDA to correct its dismal performance regarding Wuhan Virus treatments, but trying to pretend—even if its pretense is public this time—its dismal performance never happened by deleting those posts is just dishonest. The honest thing to do would have been to bring those posts back to the fore and append to them the FDA’s corrections regarding Ivermectin’s efficacy and safety.

Biden’s Pick to Run the CDC

With the current CDC honcho leaving the position at the end of the week, President Joe Biden (D) has picked Mandy Cohen, ex-North Carolina Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, to run the agency. This is the woman who, while in the NC government,

  • acceded to Anthony Fauci’s words and directions unquestioningly throughout the Wuhan Virus Situation
  • idolized Fauci with a mask featuring his image
  • imposed harsh restrictions that disrupted everyday life with no medical—or any other—benefit
  • bragged about enforcing mass shutdowns

Nominees to the CDC Directorship aren’t subject to Senate Advice and Consent, so Biden can just appoint her.

“Be More Like Europe”

That’s the mantra of the Left-Wing extremists who have become the center Left, and that was the rationalization of the Progressive-Democratic Party, of which those extremists have become the center, as Party pushed, those years ago, Obamacare, their precursor to socialized medicine.

Today, there’s this, from the part of Europe that is Great Britain. GB’s National Health Service, the Party’s model for what they want Obamacare to become has achieved this milestone:

More than 18,000 people died in Scotland last year [2022] while on NHS waiting lists[.]

Typical Arrogance of the “Experts”

US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryck, of the Northern District of Texas, has ruled that the FDA’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone must be withdrawn and the drug pulled from the market while an existing court case makes its way through, and he made his ruling nation-wide.

The Court does not second-guess FDA’s decision-making lightly. But here, FDA acquiesced on its legitimate safety concerns—in violation of its statutory duty—based on plainly unsound reasoning and studies that did not support its conclusions[.]

No, no, no—leave our precious technocrats alone is the Leftist Lawyer cry. Only Government knows best. How dare anyone challenge Government’s experts. Areta Kupchyk, ex-FDA Associate Chief Counsel:

‘Unacceptable incompetence’

That’s the description of CDC performance under the then and continuing management of Rochelle Walensky, the Sobbing Doomsayer.

The CDC found itself hoist with its own petard by making 25 basic statistical and numerical errors related to COVID-19, particularly with regard to children, while purporting to expose COVID vaccine misinformation, according to an analysis led by University of California San Francisco epidemiologists.

And they’re still at it.

…nearly as many [errors] were made in the first two months of 2023 as in all of 2021….

The Purpose of Medicaid

State Medicaid programs were created for the explicit purpose of providing health insurance coverage for State citizens on the lower rungs of that State’s economic ladder. The Federal government transfers Federal funds—the tax remittances of all of us citizens regardless of the State of which we might also be citizens—to support those Medicaid programs.

In California’s case, Federal transfers in support of Medi-Cal, that State’s Medicaid program, comprise more than 69% of the program. That amounts to 71.4 billion of our tax dollars.

Now the Progressive-Democrat governor of California, Gavin Newsom, wants Medi-Cal to pay the rent for the State’s homeless.

Some Wuhan Virus Statistics

…from the JAMA Network, measured in the 12 months from August 2021. First, some mortality rates for children:

  • 3 per 100 000 for those younger than 1 year [with their unformed immune systems]
  • 6 per 100 000 for those aged 1 to 4 years
  • 4 per 100 000 for those aged 5 to 9 years
  • 5 per 100 000 for those aged 10 to 14 years

This works out to a mortality rate of around 0.5 per 100,000 for children 14 years old and younger. For 15-19 year olds—the remaining category of “children”—the mortality rate was 1.8 per 100,000.

Maybe

The Wuhan Virus has been spreading rapidly throughout the People’s Republic of China since President Xi Jinping lifted the Virus-related restrictions he’d been imposing for the last three years.

Sun Yang, a deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, presented the figures [250 million infected with the Virus since the restrictions were lifted] during a closed-door meeting of high-level officials, according to the Financial Times. The figure, which accounts for 18% of the population, includes 37 million people who were infected on Tuesday [20 Dec] alone.

Any Excuse

to extend an “emergency” in order to continue Government’s expanded powers and reduced individual liberties, an expansion that depends on that continued emergency. Here’s the Children’s Hospital Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics in a letter to President Joe Biden (D) and HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra (D):

…unprecedented levels of RSV happening with growing flu rates, ongoing high numbers of children in mental health crisis and serious workforce shortages are combining to stretch pediatric care capacity at the hospital and community level to the breaking point[.]

Your ongoing response to COVID-19 has successfully supported strategies to mitigate the impact of health care capacity issues for adult patients. Please take this action to allow these same strategies to be employed in service of our nation’s children.

Progressive-Democrat Lies

These two are especially egregious in this final runup to voting in two weeks.

The first is by Joe Biden, our Progressive-Democrat President:

The most common price of gas in America is $3.39, down from over five dollars when I took office[.]

No, the most common price of gas in America as of the week ending January 25, 2021, the week Biden was inaugurated, was $2.39 [hit the full history XLS link for “U.S. Regular Gasoline Prices*(dollars per gallon)”, and select Data 3 in the resulting spreadsheet]. (Lots of good data on the US Energy Information Administration site.) Biden knows the actual price of gasoline, both then and now.